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The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC has officially and unanimously approved ODF 1.2 as a Committee Specification. The new version of the standard has taken four years to complete and has been adopted by many applications already. Next stage is the official vote within OASIS to adopt this specification as an OASIS standard.

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

Members of the Java Community Process (JCP) voted to approve the JavaEE 6 specification this week, concluding two years of discussions and development. Yet even after JCP members' approval for JSR-316, the Java Specification Request (JSR) that defines the new Java spec, the release still has its detractors.

What if your boss demands a new version of a spreadsheet, with fresh data, every day? Should you enter them manually? No, if your data have a fixed structure and the spreadsheet can be in OpenDocument format (ODF)! If that's the case, it only takes a bit of shell and Perl scripting to generate automatically a new spreadsheet whenever the raw data change.

A computer application that replaced paper worksheets is called a spreadsheet. It shows multiple cells that together make up a grid consisting of rows and columns, each cell containing either alphanumeric text or numeric values.

It looks like the OpenID Authentication 2.0 specification has finally been released, along with OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0. While there are some questionable features in the new specification (namely XRIs), it seems like a worthwhile improvement over the previous specification. It will be interesting to see how quickly the new specification gains adoption.

While this is certainly an important milestone, there are still areas for improvement.

"FSFE concerned about quality of standardisation process -- Today the International Standards Organisation (ISO) approved Microsoft's Office OpenXML format as ISO/IEC standard 29500 despite severe technical and legal concerns with the specification that have been raised by various parties.